A day after arriving at Stanford, he had a third stroke.“They showed me the CT scan” Karen said. “They pointedout the little strokes, which were like little white dots, butnow the whole right side of his brain was white. That’s whenIf a CT scan the next morning were clear of micro-bleeds, they would go ahead with the heart surgery — butthere was a bleed. They waited another 24 hours, stilladministering the extremely strong antibiotics. The secondCT scan showed that the bleed hadn’t continued, so he wasrushed to surgery, with neurosurgeons standing by, in casehis brain started to bleed again during the procedure.

The surgeons warned Karen that it might be a 20-hoursurgery, especially if there were problems. “The surgeonsaid, ‘If we run into complications, we’re going to come outand ask you what you want us to do,’” Karen recalled. “Aftereight hours the chief surgeon walked into the waiting room; Ithought Eric was dead! He walked up to me with a big smileand said, ‘It went better than we ever could have expected.His heart is really strong and he’s going to be okay.’”Because of the damage to the electrical system, threepacemakers had been implanted, as well as replacing theaortic valve and removing the abscess and resulting infection.He was on the super-strength antibiotics for a total of nineweeks. He still has one of the pacemakers, and he continueson daily preventative antibiotic treatment to this day.

Some of his doctors felt he was too sick for acuterehab, but the surgeon insisted. After two weeks inStanford, he went to acute stroke rehab for nine weeks.There, his years of working out and doing martial artshad a beneficial effect. “It gave me the strength to workthrough my recovery,” Eric said. “There were twoprofessional athletes there at the same time. We’d go torehab together, and working out was competition. ThatIn rehab, Eric regained bowel and bladder controland worked on cognitive function in speech therapybecause his speech had spontaneously returned before heleft the hospital. His whole left side was still extremelycompromised. Then he went to inpatient rehab closer tohome for six more weeks, and he did outpatient rehabthree or four days a week for another year and a half,through 2015.

Rehab is where Eric first got the idea of doing ashow. The title — A Piece of My Mind — came first,“and then I began to envision a show,” Eric said. “I justkept thinking about it constantly, and I told my brothers,Karen and the doctors I was going to do a show. I don’tthink anyone believed I could or that I would do it.”When he got back home, it was clear he had to leavethe university, and he decided to do the show for hisstudents because they’d never seen him perform. “Iwanted to do something special for my retirement. Thenmy colleagues told me that they had booked the theaterfor me and suddenly, all this talk had a deadline.”“His colleagues were very supportive,” Karen said.“They told Eric, ‘All you have to do is come on stageand wave and show people you’re alive and everyonewill be thrilled.’” As it turned out, so many people madereservations that a larger theatre was booked.

An inveterate performer, Eric was not going to let an
audience go to waste. In January, he began to develop
his script — with one-finger typing, at first, “but the
challenge was to remember an idea from the beginning
of a sentence to the end of a sentence, one letter at a